1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to switches and techniques for communicating signals through switches. More specifically, the present invention relates to techniques for buffering of data in a switch using dynamically assigned switch-ingress buffers.
2. Related Art
To avoid head-of-line blocking in switches, buffer-management techniques, such as Virtual Output Queues (VOQs), are commonly used. A typical VOQ includes a buffer which is associated with an input port to a switch. This buffer temporarily stores data intended for one or more output ports in the switch. Moreover, there usually is a fixed relationship between a given buffer and one or more associated output ports. Thus, in VOQs, there may exist separate queues for different groups of output ports.
However, assuming a separate VOQ per output port, the number of VOQs grows quadratically as the number of input and output ports increases. This makes it difficult to use VOQs in large switches, such as switches with hundreds of input and output ports, and terabit-per-second throughput.
Hence, what is needed is a buffer-management technique without the problems described above.